I was pleased to be able to meet the JFrog team in the JavaOne 2011 Exhibition Hall. If you're not familiar with JFrog, and you're a member or leader of a Java development team, and you employ automated build tools, and regularly produce releases for your user community -- you probably should read on! JFrog won a Duke's Choice Award at last month's JavaOne for their Artifactory repository manager; and their Artifactory 2.4.0 release breaks new ground by expanding the boundaries of what the phrase "repository manager" can mean for development teams.

The image to the right is from a tshirt JFrog was giving away to interested parties at JavaOne. The reference is to the heroic, never defeated, always cool and controlled, British secret agent James Bond, of English language novel and movie fame (he famously introduced himself with: "The name is Bond, James Bond"). I like the shirt, and I think it well represents the JFrog approach to the problems engineering teams face. Do we want to be swallowed up by the software development/release death spiral, or do we want to fight our way out of it!?

James Bond is innovative, creative, he takes risks, yet the risks are always carefully measured, and no adventure is ever risked if the potential gain doesn't far outweigh the cost. This seems to me a very good way to run an innovative company! Perhaps this notion is part of the reason JFrog chose to create this particular tshirt to give away at JavaOne. As I see it, this does indeed well fit their mode of operation.

Clearly, I'm not alone in thinking something quite brilliant is going on at JFrog. They won their 2011 Duke's Choice Award for building:

the world's first binary repository manager. Built with the Content Repository API for Java (JCR) specification, it is helping change the way developers build and manage software modules by delivering high concurrency and unmatched data integrity.

Not long after JavaOne ended, JFrog announced the release of Artifactory 2.4. This release, to me, is pretty amazing. I've been around, developing software, leading engineering teams, etc., for a while (ummm, beyond 3 decades and still going)... So, I've worked with lots of technologies.

Sometimes, something comes along that makes eminent sense, yet who'd have ever thought of it (even among most experienced developers)? So, it comes as a complete, but welcome, surprise, when a time- and headache-saving convenience is presented. To me, this is what the new Artifactory 2.4 YUM Repositories and RPM Provisioning feature represents. I work as much as possible in Linux. This new feature makes it so easy for project teams to deliver releases for the major Linux distributions directly from Artifactory.

Other primary new features of Artifactory 2.4 include P2 Repositories (for Eclipse), major performance improvements, full security management via the REST API, regex-based tokens for repository layout definition, and API and plugin additions.

You can't be a software development team's James Bond without those commitments, can you? Now, I won't call myself James Bond, or even Jevin Frog, but those principles have certainly been an important element of my own success in my 1/3 of a century long software development career.

By the way, the door is open for your participation in the Artifactory Open Source project. Did you know that Artifactory started out as an open source project, back in 2006? The objective was "trying to solve real problems with Maven integration within a variety of enterprise settings." The effort is ongoing!